5 For Friday — Links, Stories & Posts For Your Weekend
August 26th, 2011 by
Top 10 Actually Useful Tweets about Hurricane Irene — Social Times 
While Twitter by its very nature lends itself to split-second buzz and instant information sharing, sometimes that buzz is neither constructive nor informative. If you’re in the predicted path of Hurricane Irene, here’s a collection of up-to-the-minute resources (in tweet form, no less) with a wide variety of useful information with regard to pet care, keeping track of precious possessions and the locations of local resources and shelters. Keep dry and stay safe, folks — and make sure all your bases are covered with these useful resources.
Facebook’s Massive Kitchen Sink Update: Photo Tag Approvals And So Much More — TechCrunch
The long national nightmare is over and the ‘book has finally implemented something that users have been calling for since its inception: users are now allowed to approve photo tags before updates are posted to said users’ profiles. This is just one part of Facebook’s kitchen-sink approach to “Mak[ing] It Easier to Share with Who You Want,” a new suite a features that pushes a common-sense approach to privacy via explicitly displaying whether posted statuses, pictures, et cetera are public or visible at varying levels of the users’ friends. Additionally, Facebook Places has been all but eliminated, with a lack of emphasis on Foursquare-esque checkin services and more attention given to location-based deals.
Google+ Now Lets You Ignore or Block People — Search Engine Watch
Social networks of all stripes are revamping their security policies this week as Google+ announces the new capability for users to ignore or block people. Ignoring will render all of the ignorer’s posts, notifications and Circles activity invisible to the ignorer without notification; blocking takes it a step further by removing the person from your extended circles and preventing interactions between the two of you via post. Additionally, it’s also now possible to see all photos one has been tagged in via one link, as well as a handful of other minor updates.
UK to Twitter, Facebook & RIM: We Won’t Ban Social Media — Mashable
With the buzz around social media revolution at an all-time high thanks to the still-ongoing events of the Arab Spring and other political upheavals such as the London riots, many are speculating that social media crackdowns are in the future for many. However, British officials are making it clear that they will not take the path of censorship.
Search Google Maps By Talking — Search Engine Roundtable
Google has announced that voice search is coming to Google Maps. Users will now be able to get directions by speaking their location and destination into their phones. As someone who tends to get lost often and is all too guilty of frantically mobile-mapping in the car, this is going to be very useful for the mobile user base — safer, quicker and more effective than juggling phone and steering wheel.
And as a bonus link…
In case you didn’t hear our big news, here’s the NOLA.com piece on Search Influence being named in the Inc. Top 500. So nice we had to say it twice! Congratulations to the other
I just noticed the changes at Facebook and I’m actually a little annoyed. If we already have the ability to give certain “friends” access to certain content, why have yet another privacy filter?
Just one more reason for me to start using Google Plus more often.